BullsEye Robert Bosch’s first product, circa 1887, was a low voltage magneto for petrol engines. It was only in 1927 that Bosch launched its bread and butter product – injection pumps for diesel engines. Contemporary engines use a technology called Common Rail Diesel Injection. In the older design of fuel pumps a mini engine of sorts … Read more
Beyond matters of form, the team focused on the function of the multi-touch. Most touch devices at the time used resistive touch screens, based on two thin sheets of conductive material separated by a thin gap of air. When the screen is pressed, the two layers make contact, registering the touch. Resistive screens were typically … Read more
“From early on we wanted something that would seem so natural and so inevitable and so simple you almost wouldn’t think of it as having been designed,” Jony explained. The shape wasn’t the issue—“it could have been shaped like a banana if we’d wanted.” Given the parts of the device (the screen, the chip, the … Read more
Then, as now, Jony’s aesthetic tended toward minimalism, in reaction perhaps to the mid-1980s tendencies for excess. That had been the height of the “designer decade,” when the splashy colors of Culture Club and Kajagoogoo represented good taste. According to Kunkel, Jony avoided styling his products to protect them from dating too quickly. “In an … Read more
In working out his design, Jony chose to focus on the pen’s “fiddle factor.” He observed that people fiddled with their pens all the time, and decided to give the pens’ owners something to play with when not writing. He cleverly added a ball-and-clip mechanism to the top of the pen that served no purpose … Read more
When Taiichi Ohno first came to tiny Showa Manufacturing in 1984, mighty Toyota was just at the end of a thirty-five-year process of diffusing lean thinking across the Toyota Group within Japan and was just beginning to spread it across the world, beginning at the NUAUNII plant in California. Two of the basic lean concepts … Read more
A key problem—one faced by many Japanese firms today—was that Showa’s market strategy was at odds with its new production methods. Showa had discovered how to build a complete boiler in four days (compared with sixteen to twenty weeks) and how to build all boilers to special order without paying a significant production cost premium, … Read more
But talking to each other has been a key German weakness. As one looks at the educational system, at every level the emphasis is on deep but narrow skills for technical operations rather than horizontal systems thinking to pull all operations together. And this is reflected in career paths which have been up narrow chimneys. … Read more
As always, Chihiro Nakao’s initial foray into Porsche was a theatrical tour de force. When he arrived for his first visit in the fall of 1992, he insisted that Wiedeking immediately accompany him to the assembly plant. After walking through the door and looking at the stacks of inventory, he asked in a loud voice: … Read more
The original Pratt & Whitney Company was created before the American Civil War by Francis Pratt and Amos Whitney. These “Yankee mechanics” learned their trade as inside contractors at Samuel Colt’s armoury, opened in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1855. They produced the individual parts needed for Colt pistols and rifles, hiring their own workforce but using … Read more
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